The present invention relates generally to tape cassette loading mechanisms, and particularly to a mechanism for loading cassettes into a tape drive from a multi-cassette magazine.
Magnetic tape may be used to store data, both as the primary storage means and as a backup to data normally stored on disk. Digital audio tape (DAT) cassettes originally developed for audio applications have been found useful for this purpose because of their small size and large storage capacity. Conventional DAT drives are adapted to receive a single DAT cassette at a time, either to play its contents or to record data thereon. Although DAT cassettes have a relatively sizable storage capacity, the amount of data which it is desired either to access or to back up continues to increase. It would clearly increase the usefulness of a DAT drive if it could be augmented with a cassette changer which would automatically load any one of a number of cassettes stacked in a single magazine. A group of such stacked DAT cassettes could provide an extremely large library of information or, where used as a backup, could multiply manifold the data that can be backed up by an unattended DAT drive. The present invention provides a loading mechanism capable of inserting DAT cassettes from a common magazine into a DAT drive and a magazine for holding DAT cassettes which is uniquely adapted for that purpose.